Anker was a man to give advice, generally. When he cast an eye on me, foaming and r'aring, he concluded he'd take the same, for once, and ambled out of that.
He kept his word, though. He made me regret it. You'd hardly believe a man near fifty years old would hold a grudge against a sixteen-year-old boy hard enough to lie about him on every occasion, and poison the boy's father's mind, would you? That's the facts. He stirred the old man up by things he "really didn't like to tell, you know, but felt it his painful duty"—and so forth. Yes, sir; he made me regret it plenty. You might say he broke our home up. And so, if ever I meet that gentleman in the hereafter, above or below, him and me is going to have some kind of a scuffle—but shucks! There's no use getting excited over it at my age. The good Lord's attended to his case all right, without any help from me.
In all kinds of little things mother and father were separated by miles. Take the case of old Eli Perkins, the tin-peddler, for instance. Mother used to love to buy things from Eli, to hear him bargain and squirm, trying his best to give you a wrong steer, without lying right out. "Well, now, Mis' Saunders," he'd say, "I ain't sayin' myself thet thet pan is solerd tin; I'm on'y repeatin' of what I bin tolt. I du' know es it be solerd tin; mebbe not. In thet case, of course, it ain't wuth nineteen cents, es I was sayin', but about, about ... well, well, now! I'll tell you what I'll do, ma'am. I'll say fourteen cents and a few of them Baldwins to take the taste out 'n my mouth—can't do no fairer than thet now, kin I? Yassam—well, nuthin' more to-day? Thankee, ma'am." And Eli'd drive off, leaving mother and me highly entertained. But father'd scowl when his eye fell on Eli. It seems that the poor old cuss was a child of the devil, because he would take Chief Okochohoggammee's Celebrated Snaggerroot Indian Bitters for some trouble Eli felt drawing toward him and tried to meet in time. When Eli got an overdose of the chief's medicine he had one song. Then you heard him warble:
"Retur-n-n-n-i-n' from mar-r-r-ket,
Thebutterneggsallsold,
And—will you be so kind, young man,
And tie 'em up for ME?
Yaas I will, yaas I will, w'en we git UPon the hill.
And we joggled erlong tergether singin'
TOORAL-I-YOODLE-I-AAAAAAAAAAAAY!!"
Well, sir, to hear it, and to see Eli, with his head bent back near to break off, his old billy-goat whisker wagging to the tune, was to obtain a pleasant memory. The way that "TOORAL-I-YOODLE-I-AY" come out used to start old Dandy Jim, the horse, on a dead run.
Another offspring of the same split-hoof parent was Bobby Scott, the one-legged sailorman that used to whittle boats for us boys when he was sober, and go home from the tavern Saturday nights at the queerest gait you ever saw, playing his accordion and scattering pennies to the kids. I always liked any kind of music; pennies didn't come my way so often—how were you going to make me believe Old Bob was a wicked sinner? I didn't, nor that Eli was neither. I thought a heap of both of 'em.
But railroading was what gave me the first wrench from the home tree. It happened one evening I wandered over the hills to the end of the little jerk-line that ran our way, and watched the hostler put the engine in the shed for the night. It was a small tea-pot of an engine that one of our Western 'Guls could smear all over the track and never know there'd been an accident, but, man! she looked big to me. And the hostler! Well, I classed him with the lad that hooked half-dollars out of the air at the Sunday-school show, and took a rabbit out of Judge Smalley's hat. But the hostler was a still more wonderful man. I tried to figure if he'd ever speak to me, and what I should do if he did. Every time I got the chores done early, I skipped it over to the railroad, till finally the hostler he sees a long-legged boy eating him with his eyes, and he says:
"Hello, bub!"
I scuffed my feet and said, "Good morning."
The hostler spit careful over the top of the switch and says, with one eye shut, "Like a ride?"